Dead Guilty

Room, or sometimes simply Big Room. Diane had the same love of the museum as she did for caves. It was calming to her, which was why she always took the museum route out of her crime lab.
She opened the huge doors to the Pleistocene room and entered the main lobby again. Chanell wasn’t at the front desk. Probably making her rounds. Diane unlocked the outside doors and walked out into the hot night air. Her car was parked almost alone in the middle of the lot. As she walked toward it, an uneasy feeling crept over her.
She looked around, wondering what might be caus ing the feeling. The lights from the high poles illumi nated the entire parking lot. Beyond the lights was darkness. It never bothered her before. She scanned the dark border, looking for something that she might have subconsciously seen from the corner of her eye. Nothing. Silly, she thought, as she clicked the button that unlocked the driver’s side door of her Taurus.

Chapter 15
    When the car door unlocked, the dome light illuminated the interior. As she reached out to open the door, she saw a bouquet of red roses lying on the backseat. Diane smiled. Frank must be back. She looked around the lot but didn’t see his car. Why hadn’t he come into the museum? She took the flowers into her arms and smelled one of the roses, a bud just barely open. Nice . The card was slipped between the flowers and the tis sue wrapping—no name, simply two words printed in a script font that read: TO JUSTICE.
    Frank’s side must have won the case, she thought. Diane slid onto her car seat and put the flowers on the passenger’s seat. The aroma of the bouquet filled the car. It was odd, though, not like Frank to just leave flowers. Perhaps Star, his adopted daughter, put him up to it. Diane started the engine and drove home.
She lived in a huge old Greek revival house con verted into apartments. It had a good feel to it. Once inside, she put the flowers in a vase of water, kicked off her shoes and headed for the shower. The cool water felt good, a relief from the heat. The landlady still had not fixed the air-conditioning.
Out of the shower, Diane turned on the ceiling fan, slipped into a nightgown and started to set her radio alarm for the morning when she noticed the red blink ing light on her answering machine. She crawled in bed, hit the replay button and lay back to listen to the messages. The first was from Frank.
‘‘Hi. Since you’re not there, you’re probably work ing yourself to the bone, so I won’t try your cell phone. I’m still in San Francisco, but I’m catching a plane tomorrow. I’ll call. Get some sleep.’’
If he was still in San Francisco, who sent the flowers? Diane wondered as she listened to the next message play nothing but road noise. She deleted it, and the machine cycled to the third message. A deep male voice she didn’t recognize spoke.
‘‘Why won’t you talk to me? I’ve tried your cell phone, your E-mail and your home. I need to talk to you.’’
Wrong number? She checked the caller ID. One call came from San Francisco; that was Frank. The next two were from Denver, Colorado, and Omaha, Nebraska.
Denver. ‘‘I wonder if that’s the same number as the cell phone call earlier at the lab,’’ she said aloud. ‘‘Who do I know in Denver?’’
Couldn’t be a wrong number; he had tried both phone numbers and her E-mail. She didn’t know any one in Omaha either.
She shrugged, deleted the message and lay back in bed, thinking that perhaps Frank had the flowers de livered. But who put them in her locked car? Andie? Made sense. Had she given Andie a key? She drifted off to sleep.
Diane awakened abruptly at the sound of the ring ing telephone. She looked at the clock—6:00 A.M. Her radio came on as soon as she reached for the phone. She shut it off as she picked up the receiver.
‘‘Yes?’’
‘‘Diane, this is Lynn Webber. I hope I didn’t wake you.’’
Lynn’s voice sounded strained, and Diane was sud denly wide awake, wondering if something else had happened.
‘‘No, you didn’t. Have they found another body?’’
‘‘I had a very disturbing conversation with Sheriff Braden yesterday.’’
Diane waited.
‘‘He told me you contradicted my time of death in the Cobber’s Wood murders. That was very in appropriate.’’
‘‘What? What are you talking about?’’
‘‘Those bodies were not far enough advanced to have been out in the woods more than a week.’’
‘‘Why are you calling?’’